Arsenic in drinking water is a severe public health risk in Vietnam especially in the Red River Delta (RRD), northern Vietnam. Located in the RRD, Hanam is the most affected province by arsenic contamination of groundwater. Several programs have been initiated and implemented in Vietnam especially in the rural areas to address the problems of arsenic in drinking water, among those piped water from centralized water plants. However, it is the fact that like many developing countries, in Vietnam efforts have been focused mainly on engineering aspect of technologies, while the nature of water users’ needs is neglected. This study assessed the determinants of piped water connection in arsenic contaminated areas of the RRD based on a field survey of 443 households in Hanam province. We found that, most of the respondents in RRD were aware of arsenic contaminated water but did not have deep knowledge on the issue and long-term health effect of consuming arsenic contaminated water. Connection fee, arsenic awareness index and household expenditure presented the most influential factors affecting the decision of getting connected. We discussed the implication of connection subsidies, awareness raising and collective action policy for providing safe water for the welfare of all society.

ASEAN is one of the regions with great potential of the world economic power. Countries included in the association of Southeast Asian countries are predicted to show strong economic growth. There are many factors for the development of the ASEAN region such as insurance industry. The Southeast Asian insurance industry, with a stable and long-term financial asset commitment, could play a bigger role in supporting the region's overall economic growth. This study aims at investigating the contribution of the insurance sector measured by three parameters; namely insurance penetration, insurance density and premium volume. The research was conducted to investigate the factors which are related to the insurance industry and could affect the economic growth of 6 countries; namely Singapore, Malaysia, Philippine, Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesia, in ASEAN area over the period 2005-2015 using a fixed effect model. The result revealed that premium volume of life insurance and non-life insurance, respectively, maintained positive and significant effects on the econom-ic growth. Life insurance penetration and density also give significant effects on economic growth while non-life insurance penetration and density are not statistically significant for the economic growth.

This study investigates the importance of management accounting systems (MAS) and interactive budget use at middle to lower level employees in the public service administration. The study tries to understand the effect of interactive budget use on the interrelationship between MAS information and job performance. The study sends a questionnaire to each potential participant of 40 public ad-ministration offices located at West Java Province of Indonesia. Out of 120 distributed, the study obtains 78 usable data and analyses using Path-Analysis. The study finds that MAS information improved interactive budget use. Both variables of MAS information and interactive budget use significantly boost the job performance. However, interactive budget use did not moderate in the re-lationship between MAS information and job performance. The study implies that director/chairman and managers can open communication channels to subordinate to increase MAS information which leads to the improvement interactive budget use in order to generate excellent performance. This study confirms that MAS information should increase the implementation of interactive budget use to leverage the administration service and civil services in gaining competitive advantage. The study investigates the importance of MAS information and interactive budget use at middle to lower level employees in public service administration office.

The purpose of this study is to measure the role of job stress among the academic staff of the public universities of UAE. A survey was conducted among 350 academic staffs of the public universities across UAE, concerning the trends of job stress and satisfaction and a possible relationship between these two variables. Primary data analysis reveal that the public universities showed different directions for varying forms of job stress. Moreover, five types of stressors were found to be significant for the academic staff at the universities and when they were tested on job stress, the results revealed the significant impact on job stress. More specifically, pay, and growth stressors as well as work-related stressors were found to negatively influence job stress for the academic staff. Future research of time series analysis can be conducted to understand the trends of stress under different situations over time for academic staff.

Nowadays, there are many uncertainties and risks prevailed in environment especially for information technology (IT) projects in Pakistan context. Behavioural aspects of project management play important role to attain success. Soft dimension of project implementation profile consists of critical success factors like top management support and client acceptance. The proposed study of this paper designs a questionnaire and examines the relationship between behavioural factors and project success. There were 223 respondents from the population of Pakistan software board directory. The results indicate that client acceptance had a positive and significant relationship with project success. Moderation was performed categorical of leadership style; transactional and transformational leadership style.

The management of knowledge assets is crucial for gaining competitive advantage and has a huge strategic importance for the firms. Knowledge management has become one of the emerging fields in today’s research world and has turned out to be a major concern for the organizations as it plays a crucial role in the growth and development of the organization. Knowledge management is a new concept that is why it is gaining increased attention among small and large organizations. In this study three important knowledge management practices are discussed and the necessary insights regarding knowledge management processes and their positive impacts within an organization are provided. The study also brings forth the relationships which knowledge management processes have with radical innovation in small and medium enterprises. The explanatory method of research and quantitative type of research to test the hypothesis of research was used to carry out the study and survey type was involved by using questionnaire. The knowledge management and innovation instruments were adapted from previous researchers. This study’s target population consisted of small and medium-sized enterprises that included service sectors in Quetta, Balochistan. A convenient sampling was applied to collect the necessary data from SMEs. A total of 850 firms were communicated and requested to participate in this survey but 300 (35.6% response rate) accepted to fill out the survey questionnaire. The study utilized structural equation modelling to examine numerous complex cause and effect relationships between variables. The results indicate a positive association between Knowledge management processes and radical innovation. The positive link between Knowledge management processes and innovation indicates the importance and value of knowledge management in achieving competitive advantage through innovation.

The aim of this study is to identify the impact of adopting and using electronic collaboration tools on knowledge management processes at the Generations For Peace (GFP) Organisation in Jordan. To achieve the objectives of this study, the researchers used an analytical descriptive method by developing a questionnaire consisting of (46) items. A comprehensive survey was adopted for the study and 300 questionnaires were distributed among the study population consisting of GFP Arabic-speaking staff. 281 questionnaires were returned (93.6% of the study sample) and 267 were suitable for analysis. The researchers used SPSS to analyse the data. As part of the study’s results, deficiency, on the one hand, was found in the use of electronic links among individuals. Furthermore, the researchers found a drawback in GFP’s use of strategies that reduce bureaucracy at work. Another deficiency was found as well in encouraging informal meetings at GFP among staff to exchange work-related views. But on the other hand, knowledge management processes were highly scored; the highest score was given to ‘knowledge storage’ followed by ‘knowledge generation’, ‘knowledge application’ and lastly ‘knowledge sharing’.

The objective of this study is to assess the impact of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and risk management (RM) on financial performance (FP), and evaluate the moderate role of firm size in the relationship between risk management and financial performance. The study was conducted on a re-search sample of 389 Vietnamese textile firms. The results show that corporate social responsibility (CSR) was an optimal measure to minimize risks and improves financial performance. The good CSR policy reduces corporate risk and improves financial performance. Other way, the bad CSR policy increases corporate risk and impacts negatively on financial performance. In addition, the moderate role of firm size in the relationship between risk management and financial performance is statistically significant.

The first Social Progress Index (SPI) report was released in 2013; a handful of studies examined the determinants of social progress at country level as an instrument in evaluating nation’s prosperity. This study focuses on determining the relationship between institutional quality measured by the World Governance Index (WGI) and social progress measured (SPI).The results are based on the secondary data from 107 countries over a four year period (2014-2017), after controlling Gross Domestic Product per capita, innovativeness and trustworthiness. The result was in favor of the fixed effect model. The findings illustrate that institutional quality was consistently significant in fostering social progress. This study is unique in that, it is the first that examined the role of formal institutional quality in promoting social progress at country level by using SPI as a measurement of social progress.

This study tries to deal with knowledge collaborative approach of relationship learning which is a strategic perspective entails of creating collective knowledge to demonstrate the role of inter-organizational learning through project-based organizations (PBOs). This helps in enhancing the abilities of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in metropolitan areas witnessing duality in the legal framework under which these organizations operate, and how such circumstances affect NGOs operating in autonomous regions to maintain long-term linkages with their partners to achieve sustainable development. Based on a survey conducted from 146 respondents, we have illustrated that inter-organizational learning was significantly associated with building the capacity of NGOs to maintain long term linkages with international partners, as well as its significant relation-ship with obtaining sustainable performance. Moreover, the value creation has appeared to have a partial mediation role between inter-organizational learning and sustainable performance while legal framework seems to have a significant moderator role in hindering the relationship between interrelation learning and value creation.